From the Occult '70s to the Time Traveling Present

April 12 to 23, 1975 I read:

Occult America, John Godwin

I had no recollection of this book, which evidently was the only one I read until around May 23 during this period. (So the next few weeks entries will be all 2005, it looks like--but I digress) I looked it up and found: OCCULT AMERICA, By John Godwin; 1972, Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Online at the Church of Satan's web site I found an amusing excerpt of Godwin's meeting with Anton LaVey in his San Francisco Church of Satan headquarters. He starts this chapter by saying--

All you have to do is ring a certain San Francisco telephone number and wait until a chirpy secretarial voice at the other end says, “Good morning, Church of Satan.” It is, let’s face it, a wee bit anticlimactic.

The Church was founded in 1966 by Chicago-born Anton Szandor LaVey, whose exotic names derive from Romanian, Alsatian and Georgian ancestry. He got off to a rather creaky start when—in order to raise support for his movement—he staged some embarrassingly naïve nightclub rituals involving topless witches and a bikini-clad “inquisitioner”; allegedly a former counselor for Billy Graham.

Godwin was irreverent and had a reportorial eye for hype, so I probably enjoyed the book.

Some people are frightened or threatened when young people explore fringe ideas. But I think that fear doesn't stop the people doing the exploring. I suspect that people who feel threatened are looking through the lens of their own religion, and fearing ideas that don't have an official stamp of approval. I've been a religious fanatic, and I know that mindset well.

In fact, one reason I was exploring books out on the fringe reality in 1975 was looking for boundaries. I was hitting my head against the wall--sometimes literally--trying to get my brain working again after a seven-year fanatical interlude. I wasn't looking for a different religion--Buddhism had saved my life before and was continuing to do so--still does so to this day. But back then I was sifting out how to be a Buddhist without being a fanatic.

The Occult America book was not a particularly dark or scary one. From the excerpt, it seems to have been more of a reporter shaking his head at human folly. The English do that so well.

April 12-15, 2005, I read:

Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde
Speaking of the English doing things well, this is the sequel to The Eyre Affair. It moves a little slower, but there are action sequences. I truly savored the whimsical Alice in Wonderland alternate universe Fforde has created, where the heroine Thursday Next could genetically engineer her own dodo from an over-the- counter kit, small groups of reengineered wooly mammoths migrate north to south across England to the delight of tourists, and the occasional Hispano-Suiza motorcar is dropped on our heroine's picnic blanket from a passing hot air balloon freighter.

Time is out of joint and in order to put it right, our heroine has to go voyaging through it, also through a breathtaking library in another dimension that contains all the books written, or even imagined. Sigh. I was, of course, captivated, tending as I do to watch My Fair Lady repeatedly in order to examine the Professor Higgins library more closely. I think I would like to live there.